Understanding Evil Through Symbolism: Insights from Ricoeur and Becker

Evil is one of philosophy’s oldest and most unsettling problems. Most attempts to explain it focus on human choices, social structures, or theological doctrines. But two thinkers – French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker – took a different route. They argued that to truly understand evil, you first have to understand the symbols, myths, and psychological defenses through which human beings express and experience it. Their insights, taken together, reveal something profound: evil is not simply what people do – it is rooted in what people fear, desire, and refuse to face about themselves.

Why symbols? The case for a symbolic approach to evil 🔗

Evil resists direct definition. When philosophers, theologians, or psychologists try to pin it down in plain terms, something always escapes. Ricoeur believed this was not accidental. Evil, in its deepest dimension, cannot be said directly – it can only be symbolized. A symbol, for Ricoeur, is not a mere figure of speech. Symbols carry three dimensions simultaneously: the cosmic (relating to the world), the oneiric (relating to the inner psyche), and the poetic (relating to human expressivity). This is why ancient cultures reached instinctively for myths and rituals – not because they lacked rational tools, but because the experience of evil demanded a richer language than reason alone could supply.

Ricoeur’s central methodological commitment, captured in his famous aphorism, is that “the symbol gives rise to thought.” Theology, philosophy, and moral reflection do not begin in a speculative vacuum but emerge from the dense system of meaning already embodied in symbolic narratives. In other words, if we want to understand evil philosophically, we have to start with the symbols that cultures have used to confess and articulate it – and then think from within those symbols, not around them.

Ricoeur’s three primary symbols of evil 🔗

Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil (1967) is the second volume of his larger Philosophy of the Will, a project that asked how human beings can misuse their freedom and choose evil. In the book’s first part, Ricoeur identifies three primary symbols – defilement, sin, and guilt – as the most primal and spontaneous expressions through which humanity has confessed its encounter with evil.

Defilement: evil as contamination 🔗

The most archaic of the three symbols, defilement treats evil as a kind of stain or pollution – something that attaches itself from the outside and corrupts. Evil here is not a simple absence of good but a positive power – something that actively marks, infects, and diminishes the person who comes into contact with it. Ritual purification rites across cultures – washing, sacrifice, exile – reflect this sense that evil is a real force that must be expelled or neutralized. Though pre-rational in origin, the symbol of defilement captures something psychologically real: the sense that wrongdoing leaves a trace that merely thinking differently cannot erase.

Sin: evil as broken relationship 🔗

The symbol of sin moves the understanding of evil from the physical to the relational. Sin is not primarily about contamination; it is about rupture – a severing of the bond between the human person and the sacred, or between one person and another. Myths seek to account for the crisis in the bond between human beings and the sacred, providing a sense of the whole in which humanity lives. In the symbol of sin, evil takes on an ethical dimension: it is a transgression, an act of turning away from what is binding and good.

Guilt: evil internalized 🔗

Guilt is the most personal of Ricoeur’s three symbols. Where defilement comes from outside and sin marks a broken relationship, guilt is reflexive – it is the voice of an accusing conscience turned inward. In The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur describes guilt as distinct from suffering, carrying a voluntary quality – it is the human capacity to recognize oneself as the author of evil. This is a crucial philosophical move. Guilt presupposes moral agency: to feel guilty is to acknowledge that one could have done otherwise. It is the site where evil becomes genuinely personal rather than cosmic or communal.

These three symbols converge in what Ricoeur calls the “servile will” – a condition in which freedom, meant to be exercised openly, has become enslaved to itself, turning the act of binding oneself into the state of being bound. Salvation, in Ricoeur’s framework, involves the deliverance of freedom from this self-enslavement – and this liberation, he insists, cannot be stated in plain prose but only through the symbolic language of redemption and forgiveness.

Human fallibility: the condition that makes evil possible 🔗

Ricoeur does not treat evil as an anomaly or a foreign intrusion into human nature. He locates its possibility within the very structure of what it means to be human. In his companion work Fallible Man (1960), he argues that human beings are constitutionally fallible – not in the sense that they inevitably do wrong, but in the sense that they are permanently capable of it.

The source of this fallibility lies in a fundamental disproportion: the gap between our finite, bodily existence – our passions, desires, and limitations – and our infinite aspirations – our capacity for reason, universal judgment, and the longing for meaning that exceeds what life can deliver. We are neither purely finite animals nor purely rational beings. We exist in the tension between the two, and it is precisely this tension that makes the misuse of freedom possible.

This disproportion shows up in human desire for possessions, power, and prestige. None of these desires is inherently evil – but each carries within it the potential for excess, self-deception, and the subordination of others to one’s own ends. Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology thus does not moralize but diagnoses: it shows why evil is always a live possibility for any human being, not a deviation restricted to the wicked.

The transition from innocence to guilt – the experience of falling – is central to this picture. The very idea of a downfall implies reference to a lost innocence that we understand well enough to name, and to recognize the present condition as a lapse or a fall. We do not simply find ourselves guilty; we recognize our guilt against a background of what we might have been. It is this structure – the awareness of a lost integrity – that makes moral life possible and meaningful.

Becker and the immortality project: how the fear of death breeds evil 🔗

Ernest Becker approaches the symbolism of evil from a very different angle – not through phenomenology or hermeneutics, but through cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis. His Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Denial of Death (1973) argues that the deepest driver of human behavior is not sexuality or aggression, as Freud proposed, but the terror of death.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of mortality. Unlike other animals, human beings are aware that they will die. This awareness generates what Becker calls existential anxiety – an underlying dread that, if faced directly, would be psychologically unbearable. To manage this anxiety, people construct what Becker calls immortality projects (or the causa sui project): systems of meaning, value, and identity that promise to connect individual life with something that endures beyond death.

The three faces of the immortality project 🔗

Immortality projects take several forms: personal projects like creating art or building a family; societal projects like national identity or cultural belonging; and religious projects that promise literal transcendence of death through afterlife. All of these serve the same underlying function: they allow the individual to feel heroic – to feel that their life matters, that it leaves a mark that death cannot fully erase.

The problem is not the projects themselves. The problem is what happens when they are threatened. Becker argued that the conflict between contradictory immortality projects – particularly in religion – is a major source of the violence and misery in the world, including wars, genocide, racism, and nationalism, since immortality projects that contradict one another threaten the core beliefs and sense of security of those who hold them. When my system of meaning – my nation, my religion, my ideology – is challenged by yours, it feels like an existential threat. The result, historically, has been persecution, war, and atrocity conducted in the name of values that were supposed to be sacred.

Evil as the cost of heroism 🔗

Becker also noted that the root of evil lies in the selfishness of human beings seeking to protect their own existence in the face of mortality – an aspect of human nature he regarded as inescapable. This is a sobering diagnosis. It means that the worst acts in human history have not typically been committed by people who thought of themselves as villains. They were committed by people who believed they were defending something supremely important – a civilization, a God, a way of life – against forces that threatened to unmake it.

As Becker observed, the root of humanly caused evil is not animal nature, territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but the human need to gain self-esteem, deny mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image – and our desire for the best can paradoxically become the cause of the worst. The person trying to purify the world, defend the faith, or defeat the enemy is also, in Becker’s framework, a person fleeing from the knowledge of their own death.

Where Ricoeur and Becker converge 🔗

At first glance, Ricoeur and Becker seem to be working in very different registers. Ricoeur is a phenomenologist and hermeneutician interested in the symbolic structures of moral experience. Becker is a cultural anthropologist drawing on psychoanalysis and existentialism. Yet their accounts of evil converge on several key points.

Both insist that evil cannot be understood purely as a behavioral or legal category. For Ricoeur, it is embedded in the symbolic and mythic language through which human beings confess their moral situation. For Becker, it is embedded in the symbolic systems – religions, ideologies, cultures – that human beings construct to manage existential dread. In both cases, symbols are not decorations added on top of experience; they are the medium through which evil is both generated and confronted.

Both also take human vulnerability seriously as the condition of evil’s possibility. Ricoeur grounds this vulnerability in the disproportion between human finitude and infinite aspiration. Becker grounds it in the terror of biological mortality. A denial of death pervades human culture, and it is one of the deepest sources of intolerance, aggression, and human evil. Neither thinker moralizes by pointing the finger at the bad individual. Both argue that evil is a structural possibility arising from what it means to exist as a self-conscious, mortal, and meaning-seeking creature.

There is also a shared ethical implication. If evil is rooted in unacknowledged vulnerability – whether that is the vulnerability of fallibility (Ricoeur) or the vulnerability of mortality (Becker) – then confronting evil honestly requires first confronting ourselves. Ricoeur’s phenomenology of guilt calls individuals to recognize themselves as the authors of their own wrongs, rather than projecting them onto external forces. Becker distinguishes between the inauthentic clinging to immortality systems and an authentic engagement with the reality of mortality – a distinction that carries real moral weight. To acknowledge one’s own death, rather than fleeing from it into destructive certainty, is to open the possibility of living with greater honesty and less need to dominate others.

The practical relevance: evil, symbols, and the contemporary world 🔗

These philosophical frameworks are not merely academic. They help explain patterns that continue to shape political and social life. When communities retreat into rigid ideological or religious identities that define themselves against an outside enemy, Becker’s analysis of competing immortality projects becomes immediately legible. When individuals or nations refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing, hiding behind ritual rhetoric while guilt accumulates and festers, Ricoeur’s account of the servile will and the symbolic evasion of guilt offers a diagnosis.

Becker’s concept of immortality systems is an especially useful diagnostic tool for understanding why human beings are capable of extraordinary cruelty in the name of beliefs they hold to be good. And Ricoeur’s insistence that the symbol gives rise to thought reminds us that the first step toward addressing evil is not a new policy or institution, but a willingness to read honestly the stories, rituals, and myths through which societies express what they most fear and most desire.

Together, Ricoeur and Becker suggest that the path through evil – not around it, but through it – runs directly through self-knowledge: an honest encounter with one’s own fallibility, guilt, and mortality. Evil, on this account, is not an external force to be defeated from the outside. It is a dimension of human experience that must be interpreted, acknowledged, and ultimately borne with greater wisdom.

What do you think? If evil is rooted in human fallibility and the fear of death – as both Ricoeur and Becker suggest – does that mean we can never fully overcome it, only learn to manage it more honestly? And when you consider the symbolic systems your own society uses to define meaning and identity, do any of them carry the risks Becker warns about?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/
2. https://www.ernestbecker.org/beckers-synthesis
3. http://strongreading.blogspot.com/2010/07/paul-ricoeur-symbolism-of-evil.html
4. https://utppublishing.com/doi/pdf/10.3138/uram.24.1.40
5. https://academic.oup.com/book/39602/chapter/339532900
6. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/historians-and-chronicles/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/paul-ricoeur
7. https://philarchive.org/archive/MARPRP
8. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Denial-of-Death/Ernest-Becker/9780684832401
9. https://www.themortalatheist.com/blog/the-denial-of-death-ernest-becker
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
11. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ernest_Becker
12. https://www.ernestbecker.org/lecture-texts/practice-of-dying